Works from the Rome studio of Bertina Lopes at Bonhams

Over the past five years, the Mozambican-born Italian artist and activist Bertina Lopes, born in 1924, who passed away in 2012, has been valued both on the market and by institutions. From being a figure known mainly in Roman circles, she entered the international art circuit. The ascent to notoriety of her work, as for many activist artists who spent much of their lives more fighting for civil causes than seeking consensus in the art world, began post mortem, when a gallery owner rediscovered her talent and her prolific and generous production. It is the British gallerist Richard Saltoun who inaugurated his Roman branch in Via Margutta in the spring of 2022 with a solo exhibition of the artist's work, followed by the presentation of Lopes' work at fairs and exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including a solo show at Andrew Kreps in New York, thus broadening awareness of his work to the American public, up to the inclusion in the current exhibition of the Venice Art Biennale curated by Adriano Pedrosa.

Now, there are those who are benefiting from this rise by auctioning at Bonhams 57 works including oil paintings, drawings and sculptures from the artist's hitherto untouched Roman home-studio. The sale will be held online from 4 to 19 June with a total estimate of £300,000 and £500,000. The same studio, which for years was a meeting place for intellectuals, artists, poets, refugees and political activists to the point of becoming a symbol of struggle and resistance for freedom, was the subject of a historical reconstruction at the Museum of Civilisations in Rome, which opened a year ago and ended on 14 January.

"When Bertina's husband, the Italian Francesco Confaloni, passed away recently, he left everything to his second companion, who was Bertina's carer," said gallery owner Richard Saltoun. 'Having lived in Bertina's shadow for many years, the woman is not interested in keeping his memory alive, in fact she might have wanted to burn the works. The fact that they go to auction now is the best solution. They are late works, because Bertina's husband left the pre-1980 works to us, so the auction will not damage his market. Bertina's husband wanted us to create an archive, and we have started to do so; his second wife does not want us to continue, but we will try anyway'. By the way, the Bertina Lopes Archive was legally established in 2013 with the aim of preserving and protecting the documentary material relating to the artist's activity.
The documentary material is kept in Rome in what was the artist's home, according to the Unified Information System for the Archival Superintendencies. Therefore it should be protected.

Not all the works that will be dispersed have been released yet, but among the highlights announced by the auction house are three oils on canvas from the 1990s-2000 estimated at £15-2,000 ('Life is a Volcanic Eruption' from 1996, 'Moments are the Rings of Time' from 1995 and 'The Song of Nature' from 2000); a bronze from 1986, 'Totem', estimated at £1,000-1,500 and a self-portrait with her husband from 1968, estimated at £7-10,000.
The highest prices at auction were achieved by works from the 1970s, such as the untitled 1972 work that set an auction record of EUR 44,100 in October 2023 at Capitolium in Brescia, starting from an estimate of EUR 4-5,000. But in the gallery, values are higher, reaching up to €400,000, due to the presence of more important works, with works that have also been sold to museums such as the Tate, the Pompidou and the Guggenheim.

Born in Maputo in 1924, Lopes studied painting and drawing in Lisbon, coming into contact with European Modernism and beginning to fuse the Western artistic avant-garde with the African tradition. Back in Maputo, she participated in movements for independence from Portugal, where she was forced to return in the early 1960s due to her political views. In 1964, she moved to Rome, where she married Francesco Confaloni the following year. In this context, the artist came to artistic maturity, expressing her African identity and her anti-colonialist beliefs. In the 1970s, she took part in exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including the X Quadriennale in Rome in 1977 dedicated to artists of foreign origin working in Italy.
Over the years, he maintained his connection with the political events in Mozambique, from national independence (1975) to the subsequent civil war, which lasted more than a decade. In the 1980s and 1990s, he received several awards, up to the monographic exhibition organised by the FAO in 1996 on the occasion of the World Food Summit. Over the decades, his style has gone through phases, absorbing Primitivist, Cubist, Informal, cosmic-psychedelic influences, and reflecting his dual identity, as well as colonial and post-colonial history. In his works, art is closely intertwined with political activism and social criticism, becoming a means of expressing personal and collective freedom.